


Hypotheses

by kittydesade



Category: New Amsterdam
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-18
Updated: 2012-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-31 09:57:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if John's been looking for The One in all the wrong places?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hypotheses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snakeling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snakeling/gifts).



"Do you think it'll happen?"

John looked up, first at his drinking companion and then at the television the man had gestured at. "What, the legislation? Do I think it'll pass?" He frowned, gave it some thought. Of all the changes he'd seen in all the years he'd lived, this was one of the most contentious. He'd seen the attitudes towards what men and women did together change, too, but this was the first time he'd seen all of it treated as matter-of-fact. Attempting to strip the moral values from it and simply say, this is how people are. It has nothing to do with good or evil.

Detective John Amsterdam shrugged, drained his glass. Fruit juice and soda water, not that anyone had to know that. "It has a shot. People will challenge it."

"People always do." Bitterness laced that otherwise musical, resonant voice. He had a right to be bitter, John admitted. Hard to be on the outside looking in.

He shook his head, turned a bit more towards Dan, body open and friendly like. "It'll get there. Changes happen slow, but they do happen. Look at civil rights for the last sixty years."

Dan gave him a flat stare that, while morbidly amused, reminded him very much that he was a mostly-straight handsome and successful white blond-haired blue-eyed male in a country that held him up as the highest standards of human evolution.

"I take your point," he muttered, swirling the last drops of carbonation at the bottom of the tumbler. Now he wished he had ordered something alcoholic. "The laws changed. The people are changing, slowly. At least now more people recognize that it's unfair."

"At least there's that." Dan sighed. "Sorry. Didn't mean to bring the conversation down."

"You didn't." Not much, anyway. 

They both got refills; Dan didn't comment on the fruit juice cocktail. John didn't comment on how that was his third drink in an hour. "It's been a long day."

"Problems?" 

Dan swirled the liquid in his glass, ran a calloused fingertip along the edge. "Jacob took the job in Boston."

And there it was. Bitterness, regret. In Massachusetts it was legal, who they were, what they wanted. In New York it wasn't, but Dan's home was there. Getting to know Lily, he'd also gotten to know her friend Dan, and he'd heard all about that problem. Five years was a lot to throw away, and no doubt both of them figured the other one was doing the throwing away. "I'm sorry," he murmured.

"Yeah," Dan threw back his glass. "Me too."

John slid an arm around his shoulders before he could order a fourth, half a hug and half turning him away from the bar. He'd drowned his sorrows in booze before, a valid lifestyle choice for some but right now he realized he couldn't see his young friend like this. "Come on, kiddo. Let's get you home."

"Don't call me that. I'm older than you are." 

John shook his head and laughed, refusing to answer.

  


  


  


Dan was on the subway platform. They'd met while he was tracking down the third woman, she was a friend of his, but as John walked home after that conversation he wondered for the first time in nearly a year what would happen if it turned out to be Dan himself. Or someone else. Another man. He was eliminating half the people who had been on the subway platform on the basis that he liked women.

"Which, I always thought, was a perfectly reasonable basis for a set of criteria." Thirty Six didn't say anything, but then again he never did. "Three false starts and I'm starting to wonder."

"Wonder what?" 

John opened his mouth, then smiled and shrugged instead. Omar had a hard enough time, sometimes, watching his dad pursue the supposed love of his very long life who couldn't be Omar's mother any longer, without adding into it some different values. Not that Omar was prejudiced, he'd muttered enough about people needing to butt out of other people's business and John shared the live and let live attitude, but it was different when it was one's father.

"If I'm even looking in the right place." One hand gestured at the stack of photos, mostly blurry printouts from the security camera footage. All those people on the subway platform. It had to be afternoon rush hour, too. There could easily have been a couple hundred people passing through there around that time. 

Omar shrugged, looking through the photos. "Could take a long time to go through these, you know. By the time you figure out who it is..."

"I know, I know." That thought had crossed his mind, yes. Several times. What if the person died before he even knew who they were? What if it had already happened? Was that possible? Would he be doomed to live forever, never finding this mysterious One? Or was it something that always changed, as he changed? Surely the person who would have completed him when he was a young man couldn't be the same now that he was over four hundred or so. 

"But you think you have a new lead." 

He sighed, dropping his head and lacing his fingers behind his neck. "I don't know. Maybe just a new perspective."

Omar shook his head, dropped his mail off and went back downstairs to open the bar for the weekend. No talking to John in this mood, he always said. And he was probably right. Over four hundred years of living gave a man some weird moods. 

"Do you think it even discriminates like that?" he asked the dog, who stared at him. "One race or another, man or woman. Is it supposed to be about my idea of my perfect woman?" Or something else, someone who just fit into his life in that strange, indescribable way that everyone described their husband or wife of thirty, forty, fifty years if they were lucky. 

He didn't know. Everything the shaman had told him he'd committed to memory, the few words he had in English. Maybe it made more sense in their own language, but the sounds hadn't strung together in anything he recognized as words at the time and now they were lost in the hazier depths of his past. He didn't remember any particular gender markers about the most important part. Until you find the One, and your souls are wed. 

Nothing about man or woman in there, and the United States didn't legislate on the basis of souls, at least as far as he knew. 

"If that's what I'm waiting for, though, it's going to be a long time coming," he shook his head, going back over all the pictures he had of everyone, this time, who he'd been able to identify as passing in the subway. It was the only lead he had, he might as well make the best of it. He leaned over, showed a picture of the third guy down to the dog face eagerly resting on his knee. "What do you think, hottie or not?" 

Thirty Six liked him. But Thirty Six liked just about everyone. 

"Yeah, that's what I thought."

  


  


  


"Do you believe in soulmates?" 

He still didn't know how to answer that question. Hope of mortality demanded that he say yes. "I like to keep myself open to the possibility," he hedged, because if he said yes it opened Dan up to thinking he'd lost his forever, and he liked the guy too much to do that to him. "What about you?"

Dan stared at his sandwich, pulling out a few straggling pieces of limp, discolored lettuce. "I don't know what I believe anymore," he muttered. The sandwich made it halfway to his mouth before he decided he wasn't that hungry and put it down again. "I had an email from Jacob. He's doing great. All moved in, meeting his co-workers. Going out for drinks with one of them tonight." 

Which was what prompted this lunch date, as Dan had called it. Just so he could show Jacob he was doing all right, too. "You know that the odds of him meeting someone ... compatible." There was a delicate word for it. "Are pretty slim, yeah?" 

Dan took a couple of bites out of his sandwich in revenge for his lack of appetite, it looked like. "I know," he muttered with his mouth full. "Won't stop him from ta--"

"Dan." John interrupted. Not raising his voice nor making his tone any more stern, but it carried the weight he'd learned how to wield over the centuries. "That's not helping."

"No, you're right." Muttering even more quietly, sinking into his chair. John wasn't helping either, and maybe considering his track record he should get out of the love guru business. Such that it was.

"Maybe you're looking in the wrong places," he blurted out. Whether that was directed at him or at Dan he didn't know; he'd known when he said it but a second after the words left his lips he had no idea. It applied equally and unnervingly well to both. "Maybe... you're looking for something so hard you're missing all the clues when they're right in front of you."

"Looking for something?" Dan barked a laugh with too much edge in it for humor. 

John shrugged. "Looking for love in all the wrong places?" he sang. "You have a specific type. You expect there to be someone. You were given clues, a word, a gesture." His accent thickened when he wasn't looking, just a hair on the wrong vowels. "You were told that when you found this person, magical things would happen. But you keep looking in that one place, for that one person, and you haven't found anything magical yet."

Dan stared at him as though he'd started babbling in, well. In his native language. "What are you talking about?"

"Come out with me."

And even more staring. "Come what with who?" 

He stood up, knocking his chair back a couple inches and came around the table with enough force of personality to set Dan pushing his chair back and looking up at him wary and sideways. "Come with me. Out. Like you wanted to."

It took Dan a second or two more to come up with a response that didn't involve some form of stammering. "But you're straight." It didn't sound like a statement either. More of a question. John was quick to point out the flaw in that logic.

"No, you assumed I'm straight. Because I've dated women in the past, that you know of, and been married to them. That you know of. And you should know as well as anyone that that's no sure guarantee of sexual identity."

His friend pushed to his feet, still watching John as though he expected some kind of trick. John kept his body language as open as he could manage it without being fake, hands spread rather than tucked into his pockets, eyes wide and in earnest. He meant it, he wasn't faking. He knew a number of good places to take a date on short or no notice, and he knew where the TKTS discount booth was. Back to Omar's for drinks after if things went well, he could put together a pretty good afternoon and evening's entertainment on short notice. And while he turned that all over in his mind Dan watched him for any sign that he would start laughing, turn it all into a joke. Just kidding.

It wasn't funny. Not to John, anyway. "All right," he nodded, still with his eyes fixed on John's face as though the other man would jump him if he looked away or showed any sign of weakness. Not in the fun way, either, though maybe he hoped for it. He'd traded on his good looks with the ladies before, but he had no idea what Dan's type was, other than the one guy. "All right. One night out."

"Just one," he grinned, gesturing Dan out from between the table and the wall of the cafe ahead of him. "I'll pick you up at five, we'll go out, have an early dinner, and I know where all the best shows are playing."

"I'm sure," Dan said. His face disagreed, but the smile was more genuine than it had been in days. Since Jacob had left, in fact.

He tucked his arm through the other man's as they walked back to the parking lot. "I'll be the best rebound date you've ever had."

"You wouldn't have to go far for that."

"... The best first date you've ever had?"

Dan chuckled. "Better."


End file.
